sound of the American caravanserai.

If there is anything the Americans pride themselves on--and justly--it
is their handsome treatment of woman. You will not meet five Americans
without hearing ten times that a lone woman can traverse the length
and breadth of the United States without fear of insult; every
traveller reports that the United States is the Paradise of women.
Special entrances are reserved for them at hotels, so that they need
not risk contamination with the tobacco-defiled floors of the public
office; they are not expected to join the patient file of room-seekers
before the hotel clerk's desk, but wait comfortably in the
reception-room while an employee secures their number and key. There
is no recorded instance of the justifiable homicide of an American
girl in her theatre hat. Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood,
the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex. But
even this gorgeous medal has its reverse side. Few things provided for
a class well able to pay for comfort are more uncomfortable and
indecent than the arrangements for ladies on board the sleeping cars.
Their dressing accommodation is of the most limited description; their
berths are not segregated at one end of the car, but are scattered
above and below those of the male passengers; it is considered
_tolerable_ that they should lie with the legs of a strange, disrobing
man dangling within a foot of their noses.

Another curious contrast to the practical, material, matter-of-fact
side of the American is his intense interest in the supernatural, the
spiritualistic, the superstitious. Boston, of all places in the world,
is, perhaps, the happiest hunting-ground for the spiritualist medium,
the faith healer, and the mind curer. You will find there the most
advanced emancipation from theological superstition combined in the